Season thoughts. Chaser burnout. The end of my "Chasecation" arrived. I'm spent. My thoughts on the 2021 Tornado Season, and my most recent catch, the Kim-Pritchett cone Tornado from May 29.
Burn out. Tornado season update
It's been one heck of a season. And even though i've seen many tornadoes on many chase days, it felt like the failures and "what could have beens" dominated the season for me. This was the story for many other chasers too. Many times this May tornado producing storms happened outside of primary target areas and I'd miss them. Or storms failed to mature.
In spite of the success. Day after day of missed opportunities have worn me out. Not to mention staying up late at night photographing sprites, Being constantly a 6 hour drive from the next day's target, equipment problems. And besides. Doing this all mostly on my own and pissing both time and money away for days on end. And soon I have a normal day job to return to as well. Well, i'm just burnt out.
But so much was different in 2021 over 2020. Tornadoes were to be found in peak spring at least! My seasonal forecast for 2021 generally had the right idea- A very active deep south, and a conditionally active high plains. But it was far from perfect. This was one of the few times a La Nina year was generally kind to the I35 coordior and the lower great lakes for example.
Luckily we haven't had a 2011-like disaster year on our hands so far. And in late April and early may, The predicted Tropical forcing lead to several tornadoes days in Texas and the deep south. I give myself a B+ for this season's forecast.
May 29, 2021 would be my final chase day for now, and I would score my 19th tornado on the season. Granted, many of those 19 were either land spouts, weren't very good encounters, or weren't very interesting. And now I shift to waiting for local events and high confidence forecast days.
Kim, Colorado would play host to what started out as a not very interesting storm. It had formed off of terrain in Southern Colorado, Mesa de Maya, and slowly inched itself east. It was expected that any storm that formed would struggle at first. Then would encounter better moisture as it moved east, along with an increasing low level jet later in the day.
What I didn't expect, was an instantly high precipitation storm producing extremely large hail and wrapping heavy rain into it's mesocyclone.
Nonetheless, a large cone tornado was present deep inside.
Southeast Colorado has a patchwork of dirt roads and few highways, broken up by canyons.
I struggled to get good footage from a distance. Unfortunately rain wrapped tornadoes form this far away are difficult to focus on as well.
With lots of enhancement the tornado becomes more obvious.
The day would end with watching this structured beast of a storm crawl over the cimarron canyons. At one point it produced a really convincing wall cloud or scud bomb. This storm would go on to produce more tornadoes in the Oklahoma panhandle after dark. But I'm pretty tired. And it's time to go home for a bit. Of course that means the following day there were even more low predictability, but more photogenic tornadoes in the same area. I can't even make this stuff up.
Storm Chaser burnout. It's a grind out there.
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